Quotes About Complexity

The complexities of what we are given in life are vast and beyond comprehension.

before you can conquer a beast you first must make it beautiful. In some strange way, I have tried to do that with manic-depressive illness. It has been a fascinating, albeit deadly, enemy and companion; I have found it to be seductively complicated, a distillation both of what is finest in our natures, and of what is most dangerous.

We are all, as Byron put it, differently organized.

I have seen the breadth and depth and width of my mind and heart and seen how frail they both are, and how ultimately unknowable they both are.

But, as I well knew, an understanding at an abstract level does not necessarily translate into an understanding at a day-to-day level. I have become fundamentally and deeply skeptical that anyone who does not have this illness can truly understand it.

He was not, it was clear, going to gaze meaningfully into my eyes over long dinners and fine wines, nor discuss literature and music over late-night coffee and port... Yet not once in the years we have been together have I doubted Richard's love for me, nor mine for him. Love, like life, is much stranger and far more complicated than one is brought up to believe.

The Chinese believe that before you can conquer a beast you first must make it beautiful. In some strange way, I have tried to do that with manic-depressive illness. It has been a fascinating, albeit deadly, enemy and companion: I have found it to be seductively complicated, a distillation both of what is finest in our natures, and of what is most dangerous. In order to contend with it, I first had to know it in all of its moods and infinite disguises, understand its real and imagined powers.

Named for his smooth and slithery essence, the Oyster was a senior professor: he was patronizing, smug, and had all of the intellectual and emotional complexity of, as one might expect, a small mollusk. He thought of women in terms of breasts, not minds, and it always seemed to irritate him that most women had both.

the usual limits of understanding another's mind are compounded when trying to understand Lowell, a man who thought in metaphor, lived in history, and whose mind was engaged in a restless, stupendously elaborate game of three-dimensional chess. Lowell's mind was of a lurching, revising originality.

But then suppose you stepped into one of those rooms,' he said, 'and discovered another room within it. And inside that room, another room still. Rooms within rooms within rooms. Isn't that how it might be, trying to learn Josie's heart? No matter how long you wandered through those rooms, wouldn't there always be others you'd not yet entered?

She might be a great person, but life's so much bigger than just loving someone.

At the same time, what was becoming clear to me was the extent to which humans, in their wish to escape loneliness, made maneuvers that were very complex and hard to fathom

Of course, a human heart is bound to be complex. But it must be limited.

People are not two-thirds one thing and the remainder something else. Temperament, personality, or outlook don't divide quite like that. The bits don't separate clearly. You end up a funny homogeneous mixture. This is something that will become more common in the latter part of the century—people with mixed cultural backgrounds, and mixed racial backgrounds. That's the way the world is going.

Sometimes,' she said, 'at special moments like that, people feel a pain alongside their happiness

Manager, I did all I could to learn Josie and had it become necessary, I would have done my utmost. But I don't think it would have worked out so well. Not because I wouldn't have achieved accuracy. But however hard I tried, I believe now there would have remained something beyond my reach. The Mother, Rick, Melania Housekeeper, the Father. I'd never have reached what they felt for Josie in their hearts. I'm now sure of this, Manager?

Spui c? sunteÈ›i singuri? SunteÈ›i siguri c? v? iubiÈ›i? De unde È™tiÈ›i asta? CredeÈ›i c? dragostea e chiar atât de simpl??

Al mismo tiempo, lo que empezaba a tener claro era hasta qué punto los humanos, en su obsesión por evitar la soledad, hacían maniobras que resultaban muy complejas y difíciles de entender, e intuía que era posible que en ningún momento hubiera estado en mis manos la posibilidad de controlar las consecuencias de la excursión a la Cascada Monrgan

Though you must understand, it's still work in progress. And it's not always easy for a layperson to understand the way these things slowly take shape.

Life is divine Chaos. It's messy, and it's supposed to be that way.

Strive from the outset to express yourself with such clarity that a bright twelve-year-old would understand you. Any fool can make it complicated: it takes focus to make it simple.

a mathematician is someone for whom mathematics is a soap opera.

It really is brilliant news that historians can just never get things right.

I could only stare, any sense that maybe I understood him evaporating as it always did. I'd glimpse something underneath, and he'd snatched it away so fast it left bruises that called me a fool for hoping for more.